Data Turkey Award winners announced

Back-up/recovery vendor EVault has announced the winners of its first Data Turkey Awards, honoring “business professionals who have lived through a data loss, or whose actions and quick thinking have helped to avert a data disaster.”

The winner in the Most Disastrous Data Loss category was Brian Scott, president of a Texas commercial real estate firm.

When his server at work melted down, Scott went to his apartment to retrieve a back-up copy of critical business data he had stored on a portable hard drive. Yay Brian, right?

“As I was leaving my apartment, the hard drive slipped out of my hand and tumbled down a flight of concrete stairs! I ran down the stairs, but after one look at the case, I knew that years of data and lots of valuable work were lost,” he said.

Wow, that is bad luck.

Most Spectacular Data Recovery honors went to Dunbar St. Paul, president of New Orleans-based Computer Solutions.

During Hurricane Katrina, St. Paul’s entire client base (30 companies) temporarily lost access to their data. His says recovery efforts for one client “consisted of driving across the shoulder of the road, jumping over a fence and trudging through mud to reach the building – and then donning boots to wade through 18 inches of muddy, toxic water to retrieve his client’s servers.”

And yet we can’t get our vendors to return our calls… More here.